Panels:

Panel Quality

THE ONLY CONSUMER PANELS MANAGED WITH TRUSTSCORESM

We've built our own proprietary panels, and we've gained a lot of love and respect by treating our members better than most other panels do - for many years our sites have rated among the best in the industry. You can see this for yourself by noting the leading positions of our panel site PaidViewpoint.com, at the independent review site SurveyPolice.com, plus you can check out our case studies. You're also welcome to verify our panel quality for yourself by launching your own survey.

One way we respect our panelists is by limiting the number of characters per survey question and per answer, as well as the overall number of questions asked per survey (usually twenty-five maximum questions). We've found that asking folks to concentrate on a long, wordy survey for more than twenty to thirty minutes frustrates them, and will not get you the quality data you deserve. We understand that many researchers love to throw unlimited verbiage at respondents - but by doing that, they bore the people reading their surveys and end up getting garbage in return. With our character and question limits, panelists can comfortably answer any survey in less than 10 minutes without speeding, while giving each study their full attention and candor. Read more about our Survey Brevity Philosophy here.

Another way we respect panelists' time and user experience is by making sure that any survey they receive through our platform looks great and works on virtually any modern computer, tablet, or mobile device.

What does a research company have to do differently to achieve such high quality and a great reputation?

Keep your promises
We've built a strong brand with a few simple promises and we don't let down the people who decide to participate.

Don't rent out your community
We don't offer our panelists to other research platforms with inferior survey design. That's important, because as long as respondents never have to deal with broken, boring, too-long surveys which aren't optimized for mobile devices, they're happy to take surveys and will give yours more love and attention.

Build high walls
We feature quintuple opt-in to guarantee the quality of those who take AYTM surveys. In order to register and be eligible for a survey-taking incentive, you have to 1) provide a working email, 2) verify it, 3) verify a unique, working phone number from your declared country, 4) register a valid PayPal account, and 5) digitally confirm it via PayPal's API. Both - the phone number and PayPal must stay available in order to claim an incentive so they can't be easily borrowed or faked.

Assure uniqueness of respondents
We have our own fingerprinting system that tracks and analyzes cookies, devices, and other metadata, using network theory and other cutting-edge data mining methods, to ensure the uniqueness of each respondent and prevent duplicate responses.

Avoid professional survey takers
You can't make a living doing our surveys. Members of our panel are your next-door neighbors, working Americans, stay-at-home moms, Internet shoppers, store managers, entrepreneurs and professionals. These are not people mindlessly dashing through your surveys just to collect cash.

Leave no chance for the evil bots
There are bots which try to complete surveys like real respondents in order to grab cash, and we've created a host of secret honeypots designed to identify and disarm these bots. We've also incorporated Google's NoCaptcha and built it into different phases of our survey-taking process when our policing code becomes suspicious.

Invent your own quality assurance layer: TrustScoreSM
On top of everything else, we've built in a unique, semantic quality assurance layer called TrustScoreSM that rewards members for their honesty and candor. It essentially works as a lie detector, looking for inconsistencies in answers and making it virtually impossible for a non-human to pass. For example, on one day we may ask a respondent if she has a dog; if she says yes, a few weeks later we'll ask if she has a pet. If her second answer is "No," we'll point out the inconsistency and have the respondent tell us which answer is the truth. The more consistent a surveytaker is, the higher their TrustScoreSM, and the higher their chances of getting another survey-taking opportunity. Inconsistent responses caused by carelessness or automatic answering quickly lead to a lowering of a respondent's reputation in the eyes of our algorithms, eventually resulting in their account termination. By the way, keeping a false personality consistent for a long time is a very difficult thing for most people to do, so once it becomes apparent that we're paying attention to every answer, respondents become even more honest and candid.

Keep your panel healthy and growing organically
There is a lot of gamification built into the community, incentivizing members to spread the word and help us grow. This means that we don't have to skew the composition of the panel by running ads on survey-themed sites or communities.

Set up a feedback loop
Most other surveys end with a Thank You page, and never provide feedback to respondents from the researchers. Our panel is different: researchers have the ability to give kudos to the most thoughtful respondents who have provided helpful open-ended answers. Researchers can also reject up to five percent of questionable responses, and we'll automatically replace these with fresh responses. In both cases, the feedback will affect the TrustScoresSM of respondents and they'll get the message for next time.

When you launch studies on ATYM to the general population without seeking too niche a respondent, your surveys typically will be answered solely by our proprietary panels.